Old scores settled down in the pits

September 21 2002By Michael Shmith

Picture: RICK STEVENSThe Rosenkavalier first night will be Simone Young's first Australian appearance since her sacking.

When Simone Young enters the orchestra pit of the State Theatre on November 13 - the first night of Opera Australia's spring season - and launches into the opening bars of Richard Strauss' Der Rosenkavalier, she will be the company's music director in name only.

"Funny how time always goes its own way," laments the opera's age-conscious heroine, the Marschallin, who tells how she occasionally stops her clocks, "every one". No doubt some at the board and management levels of Opera Australia might wish to go one better and wind back the clocks, every one, to those halcyon days when Simone Young was the company's vibrant public image. Not much effort is required: that was a fortnight ago.

The clock-winding goes back much further. I remember another opening night of Der Rosenkavalier, 30 years ago at the Princess Theatre, conducted by the Australian Opera's new music director, Edward Downes, whose abrasive manner got him into trouble with singers and management. (Sound familiar?) It was Downes who took the company into the Sydney Opera House, not with Aida but with Prokofiev's War and Peace - a risk-taker if ever there was - and triumphed. Three years later, Downes had gone: he resigned, tired of the endless bickering between artistic and management over repertoire, costs and his own supremacy. (Sound familiar?)

Does history repeat itself so faithfully, so inevitably, that Simone Young and Opera Australia are merely settling what you might call old scores? Have things changed so little between 1975 and 2002 that, in spite of the undoubted changes in performing and administrative methods, the argument still comes back to the old feud between what is seen on stage and how much it costs to get it there?

In truth, Opera Australia has always had difficulties keeping its music directors. That is when it has had them. After Edward Downes came Richard Bonynge, but he was displaced in the early '80s by a restructure that installed Moffatt Oxenbould as artistic director.");document.write("

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The information surfacing this week shows that, as suspected, blame is apportionable to both sides. Young, it seems, was determined to do things her way (any artistic director who does otherwise is unworthy of the position).

But, with a 2004 repertoire of expensive productions and risky box office (it included Tchaikovsky's The Queen of Spades and Richard Mills' Batavia) which, if implemented, would have put OA into deeper financial trouble, she also wanted to increase the number of foreign singers - always a flashpoint as far as industrial relations is concerned - and her long absences conducting abroad represented a different, more sporadic form of leadership.

The OA side of the ledger appears to favour financial commonsense over artistic vision, which is perhaps something it could have, should have, foreseen earlier. The trouble is Young hasn't been in the job that long. It takes at least three years to determine an artistic vision, another three to consolidate it; then comes the sustaining period.

In performance terms, Young is just two-thirds of the way through the first act. Whoever takes over after that (OA chairwoman Rowena Danziger told The Age this week she hoped this person would be of comparable calibre) will obviously have to cut the cultural cloth to fit the financial frame. What price Young's vision now?

Another crucial factor in this argument is what happens in Melbourne - or, as OA's Sydney office is believed to call its Melbourne branch, "Siberia"? It is believed that in its attempt to reduce costs OA has been continuing discussions with the Australia Council about reconfiguring its Melbourne productions, which may include reducing, or dumping, the spring season of three operas. Ms Danziger would not comment on the matter, but did tell The Age: "We take our responsibility to our Melbourne audiences very seriously and any decision will be taken with great regard."

Regard for what? Perhaps it is through disregard that Melbourne audiences have not seen much of Simone Young this year, and that she is conducting only four performances in the State Theatre in 2003. Is it also disregard that Melbourne has not - and, quite possibly, will not - see OA's new productions of Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk and Weber's less well received Der Freischutz, in favour of yet another revival of Puccini's Tosca and Rossini's Cinderella?

Victorian Arts Minister Mary Delahunty said on Thursday the State Government would "not tolerate any less opera in Victoria from Opera Australia".

That Rosenkavalier first night at the Victorian Arts Centre will therefore be symbolic on several counts: Young's first Australian appearance since her sacking; an audience full of OA management and board members, probably anxious to get on with the show, and State Government officials wondering if spring will be eternal in opera terms; and, on stage, a noblewoman wishing time had stopped.